The article,
"The Medium is the Message" by Marshall McLuhan was interesting and
difficult to comprehend at times. I can see how people may misinterpret or
disagree with his reasoning's. Surprisingly I have found myself agreeing with
the basis of what McLuhan explains as the medium is the message. McLuhan says,
"Positively, automation creates roles for people, which is to say depth of
involvement in their work and human association that our preceding mechanical
technology had destroyed." I find that in result of this, automation has
isolated humans from face-to-face interaction with other humans. I also like
how he used the electric light as a constant example throughout the article.
The electric light is something that we all take for granted I think and don't
realize how important it really is. Just like the verse he chose from Romeo and
Juliet. Another idea that caught my attention was the idea that more and more
medium, technology and things are created as an escape. I can agree with this
to an extent. I think some things are made to hide from a problem. But I think
that many things were made for solution and to be helpful for society. A
question I thought of from this was, when will it ever be enough? The answer is
never, because this is how we advance and evolve. The last intriguing aspect of
this article is that it seems like a lot of these "messages" that
McLuhan talks about get buried over with new messages and may be the reason why
we don't see them as message anymore.
Jinxx21,
ReplyDeleteFirst off, I definitely agree that this article was hard to comprehend at times. There were parts that I had to look over again to try and figure out exactly what he was saying. I think that you found a nice quote to use when talking about automation. I agree with your point that automation has " has isolated humans from face-to-face interaction with other humans." Although technology has helped humans drastically, there are times when I believe we may have gone too far. I believe this to be the case when things such as face-to-face interaction are deemed irrelevant. I agree that the electric light example and some of his other examples were spot on, as they backed up his point that the medium is the message. I agree with you when you answered your own question of "when will it be enough?" I also don't think it will ever end and that thought concerns me because of how advanced technology has become over the last 10 years.
Hello Jinxx21, i really vibe with this post and your outlook upon it. The way you talked about automation was very thorough. I agree that automation is isolating humans. Now days people can sit in the house and still have interaction with 100 people if they wanted. It may start to hinder younger peoples face to face communication skills in years to come. Also about the electric light example, i too agreed with McLuhan's points about them.
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